Mongoose

I recently ran into a problem while developing some of our advanced search capabilities on Endorse.me: I wanted to find all the documents in our MongoDB database that had at least one of a number of elements as a property. This is fairly easy to do using MongoDB’s ’$in’ operator when the property is a primitive, like a string:

But what if one of our toys has multiple colors, listed in an array? I searched around for a some sort of $any operator before looking again at the MongoDB documentation for $in. Turns out, if the field has an array, it behaves exactly how I was hoping it would!

In that spirit, we’ve started open-sourcing certain modules of our Endorse.me codebase. The first release is Cellar, a simple short-term single-document storage engine for MongoDB. Built on top of Mongoose, it is intended for caching of simple schemas.

At Endorse.me, we use it in most of our external API’s to cache OAuth tokens or query results. There are more packages coming soon (including a simpler Key-Value implementation of Cellar), and pull requests are welcome!

Developing with new tools is a lot of fun. They’re usually new because they allow you to do something that you couldn’t before, or in an environment that you couldn’t before.

Node.js is like that. And while a lot of people complain that it is overhyped (and it is, to some extent), it’s just fun to work with. JavaScript can be a good language, and playing with it on the server is something new, and pretty cool. The fact that I can use the exact same validation expression on both sides increases my happiness as a developer.

However, Node is very young, and very immature. There are tons of modules out there, and more coming every day, but the fact is that you will encounter situations that no one else has encountered before (or at least documented). Coming from Rails and PHP, that’s quite the change of pace.

For starters, how do you store passwords securely in a database? Well, you use bcrypt of course! And there is, in fact, a bcrypt module for Node that is excellent…if you’re not using Windows. One of our developers was using a Windows box, and despite trying to figure out how to get it to build for about a day and half, it just wasn’t meant to be. At some point, it’s faster to boot up a Linux VM than to embody the definition of insanity.

But it’s not just Windows. We work with MongoDB for storage, and on Node, you can’t do better than Mongoose. But as I said, it’s young. So the findAndModify behavior wasn’t available in Mongoose. Taking a closer look at the source on GitHub, I found that the edge version of Mongoose did support findAndModify (in the form of findOneAndUpdate for all you Mongoose users). So I did what any overconfident dev might do: I switched to edge in order to take advantage of the new feature.

Unfortunately, there is a reason that it is not a complete release. While findOneAndUpdate works, there was at least one very nasty bug that I encountered in the Mongoose source. That, and the changes to functionality make certain design patterns much more attractive (namely, passing a Mongoose document as the update argument) that aren’t currently supported in Mongoose.[1]

And these are just the issues I’ve found. And I’ve barely scratched the surface of what Node can do.

But that’s a good thing. That’s what makes it fun. Everything has pro’s and con’s, and to me, the pro’s of what Node can do, and what I see for the future of Node are well worth some time spent here and there digging into the source code of a newer module.